With the back of the ambulance open, Doug and the driver carried the body to the shallow water’s edge, and she floated the lifeless form out to where it was a little over waist high. She pushed him in small tight circles and let the water wash completely over her body. Even with the cool night air and the cold of the bay’s saltwater, she could feel the skin under his arms warming.
“Breathe. Breathe. You can do it,” she whispered the words to herself. She thought: I can’t lose you. I can’t. You don’t know me yet. I haven’t had a chance.
And then it happened. She had just released her hold on him to adjust her grip when his body moved slightly away from her on its own. She held him by the waist, and he began to roll to the left. He turned completely onto his back under the surface. She stared down through the water and into the electric-green eyes of her future. That same instant, she made a vow. She would let time dictate every part of her relationship with this person. Whoever he turned out to be, she would never let her personal desires lead him anywhere he did not want to go.
This will be my secret until you discover it for yourself, she whispered to her heart. The pain she felt stab at her life stood vigil from that moment on.
Even then she was her intellectual father’s intellectual daughter and immediately told herself that the feelings of love or pain are completely unprofessional and lengthen the road to discovery. She was always curious how the famous Professor Barry Merrill, a Ph.D in four (count them four) disciplines—Oceanography, Ichthyology, Physics, and Ancient Cultures—could still employ phrases like, “Focus on one bird, not a flock,” or “Lizzy, you talkin’, gawkin’, or thinkin’?” or his famous (and laughed at, behind his back, in all his classrooms): “All right, people! Let’s bear down or reboot.”
But focus and think and bear down she did.
“Mark,” Elizabeth said as she walked around to the back of the chaise and came out of her recollections, “I’ll access your files from the lab before I head on to the board meeting. I will give them enough to get their profit-margin mouths watering. With the salt thing solved, I can answer whatever they might want to know.” She reached to the table, opened her purse, and removed the electronic planner. Both thumbs tapping her entries, she continued, “What are your plans for the day?”
“I have a few hour of work out there in the test gardens.” Mark nodded in the direction of the surf.
She quickly finished her notes. “Have all the transplanted specimens survived?”
“The deep water ones are doing surprisingly well and the reef urchins are making interesting color changes in this warmer water. It makes a very unique sight with all of them from so many different places in the world in one spot.”
“Someday I would love to dive out there with you and see what you’ve done. With all these meetings, I don’t get in the water nearly as much as I would like to.”
“Of course, Elizabeth, anytime you would like.”
“Business first, of course.”
This last statement came out almost as a groan. As much as it took a lot of time, she actually liked the board and its head Gasten Heycourt. She knew the drill and did it as well as anyone. Her reports were always complete and exciting, and her all-around knowledge was second to none in her field. It was during their grilling that she danced the dance. She answered all their questions. At least the parts she felt they needed to know. She delivered updates on key personnel and their projects (except Staci Torelli’s, of course), and she had done so for years now. She would mention Mark Harris somewhere deep in the list as “a good bright worker who was helping in several areas.”
Sometimes she almost enjoyed the idea of keeping Mark’s real identity top secret—even from the people who were funding (his) their work. She learned her lesson with the military when Mark was first found, and he almost became a weapon instead of the treasured key to the future she always believed him to be. The big test came when, because of the funding available, she took Mark to the navy as a top secret experimental program. Everything worked well until a coworker, who had become a close friend, leaked to her the government’s plan to find ways to replicate Mark, either through genetic cloning or through normal biological reproductive means. Their ultimate goal was to be able to use his extraordinary abilities as an expendable weapons system. It was then that she felt herself become that Jekyll/Hyde type person. She promised herself to protect Mark no matter what, even at the risk of her own life and, at the same time, to dedicate herself to discovering everything Mark knew. Even, as the years taught her, the things Mark didn’t even know he knew.
With Gasten’s money and her AORI (All Oceans Research Institute), these fifteen plus years had generated knowledge and created revenue that made it the foremost institute of its kind in the world. The more the institute accomplished the more her personal fame grew. It spread out from the scientific world and into mainstream America and beyond. With her second Time Magazine cover, she was bombarded with media attention. She soon realized that the more the world focused on her, the more she could cover Mark in anonymity. Elizabeth’s ability to deliver results and capture literally every award and commendation that the scientific world had to offer had allowed her to run the institute with little or no interference.
“When the meeting is over and the board members are satisfied, their profits will continue and I will kindly turn Gasten down one more time for dinner or a weekend at his place in Mexico or the trip to wherever or…whatever, then I will meet you at the institute around four and we can continue with the Moline test.” She had just slid the planner into the pocket of her purse when the silence made her look up at Mark. He stood there with a soft but questioning look on his face.
Those eyes held her weightless for a moment… “What?”
“Elizabeth, why do you not return Mr. Heycourt’s affection? He must care for you very much or else why would he try so hard to win your heart?”
The simplicity of Mark’s question and the lump in her throat, which stopped her from giving him a straight, honest answer, made her only choice to stand and prepare to go. She stood there, so close for a moment…
“Yes, I suppose…Gasten is actually very nice and I like him a lot, but there is a big difference between caring for someone and loving them. Sometimes winning someone’s heart is impossible.” There, that’s enough, she thought. As much as I want to open the door, I can’t take advantage of the moment.
After finding Mark almost two decades ago, she tried to resume the dating life of a young single woman. Many times, wonderful men had entered her life and she was genuinely attracted to them. No matter how far the relationships went—long romantic weekends were very enjoyable—there always came a time when her very professional mind would overpower her pleasures. Mark’s face would haunt her, and she would find herself thinking of him while at dinner or even in more uncomfortable situations. Eventually, she stopped dating except when it was the right thing for a business or social evening and began to substitute work for a relationship of the heart.
As the last words left her lips, her eyes still couldn’t leave his. On the outside, she appeared calm and detached. Damn being my father’s daughter. Her mind pleaded with Mark to understand. Please know and understand me. Know the things I can never tell you.
There it is again, Lizzy, the rollercoaster. That stupid elevator bringing stupid water to my eyes!
Clicking the clasp closed on her favorite purse, which joined a glittering snake’s head to the body that twisted down the front of the green silk, she was thankful to look away and have a moment to force the tide to ebb from her eyes.
“Someday you’ll understand, I’m sure.”
Knowing anyone else would have seen through her little false, parental-like statement—but glad Mark never doubted her sincerity—she ended her near-confession with a slight touch to his shoulder and turned to leave. “I’ll see you at AORI around four, bye!”
“If you get there before me, would…”
In mid sentence, her eyes snapped to something at the corner of the deck. The shadow she swore was there when she turned wasn’t there now. It seemed to have split in half and dropped to become the dark line of flagstone and horizontal shadow just below the bougainvillea and now was gone completely. The interruption of the sentence and her expression, prompted Mark to look to the corner and then back at her.
“What is it, Elizabeth?”
She turned from him and looked back to the spot for a moment. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she gazed once again at Mark and smiled.
“Nothing, I guess. I thought I saw something at the edge of the wall.” She tipped her head back a little so that she could see the light catch the white wings of several large gulls circling high against the clear deep blue. “A bird, maybe. A shadow from one of those gulls, I guess.”
After another glance at the corner, she continued. “What I was going to say was, if you get there before me have Jason run yesterday’s results through the computer so we know where we are.”
She turned and walked through the door, closing it behind her.
Mark watched her go, and when the door clicked shut he waited until the dark form of her head evaporated into the black interior before turning and walking to the far corner of the deck, to the place that had caught her attention.
It was only eight or ten feet from the deck and its flagstone wall to the ground. Grass clumps were as thick as a planted lawn for the first few yards and then separated into gray-green islands in a sea of sand as they got closer to the water. From where the last couple of tiny clumps made their final stand, it was perhaps fifty yards to the surf. The beach was as it almost always was, deserted. The only activity being the small shore birds, chasing the retreating waves in order to pick up the exposed sand mites.
He stood there for awhile, comforted by his closeness to the water. As his gaze moved out along the horizon, he could see a few gulls gather over a school of herring that jumped out of the water, trying to escape the larger fish or seal or whatever had disturbed them.
CHAPTER TWO
Mark turned his car off the highway and onto the long lane
that led to the institute. As he drove along the manicured driveway and away from the noise of the other cars on the highway, he was glad Elizabeth agreed to get him this Tesla 600. It wasn’t only that the electric car was quiet and smooth in its operation that had won her over; it was that in the other cars he had test driven, Mark was able to accurately identify the chemicals and their air-to-solid ratios, released into the passenger area by the exhausts. The lab verified Mark’s findings after follow-up tests.
Elizabeth had always enjoyed discovering some new ability of Mark’s.
“It makes me wonder what you think of the perfume I wear,” she once said.
As he stopped at the security gate, he smiled—remembering the way the color in her face had changed when he told her he preferred the smell of her under the perfume.
He reached into his jacket pocket for the plastic AORI pass and slid it quickly in and out of the slot at the gate. He looked to the left and into the small dark lens so the computer could match his photo and his face. It still felt strange to him that this much security was needed when most of the results for what they did at the institute became public knowledge soon after they discovered it. Elizabeth explained that the competition for patents on the type of work they were doing and the discoveries they made, made it necessary.
The lights under the monitor turned from red to green and the large iron gate slowly swung open as the sharp, curved metal points simultaneously retracted into the iron slots in the pavement that ran across the entrance. Mark drove through and into the large parking lot. As it was almost four o’clock, many of the 200 employees of AORI had already started to leave for the day.
Mark’s Tesla slid silently past the main building, and he nodded a hello to the older man heading for the exit in the black SUV. At the end of the lot, he turned after coming to the large sign that read: STOP! RESTRICTED ACCESS TO CODED PERSONNEL ONLY, and into the small alley between it and the adjoining building. This narrow access road ended at a wall under a walkway. The entire alley, walls, overpass walkway, and large white gate in the wall were solid. No windows. No openings at all. He passed under the walkway, and when his car approached the gate it began to automatically open. As it closed behind him, he accelerated towards the imposing wall several hundred yards ahead. Above this wall, he could see the roofs of several buildings beyond.
His blue car came to a halt at a solid metal gate. The large sign read: STOP! BLUE PASS ONLY FROM THIS POINT. From this position, the twelve-foot high, stone wall completely blocked any view of the buildings, and now he could not even see the red tile roofs but only the razor wire looping menacingly along the top. At this point, Mark took out the blue card from his pocket and placed it into the tray that had just extended from the kiosk by his window. The smoked glass window slid open, revealing two compartments, one above the other. From the bottom compartment, a small section extended outward until it almost touched the side of his car, while the opening on the top revealed a round lens about two inches in diameter. Mark put his left hand into the opening in the bottom tray and rested it on the soft surface inside. At the same time, he looked directly into the lens as he had done at the main gate. He could feel the minute rise in temperature on the palm of his hand as the computer read his information: fingerprints, respiration, chemical composition, and other input that would match the sequence reading it took when he left work the day before.
He had no question as to the importance of the security measures. Elizabeth and he had gone to great lengths over the years to protect information about him from getting out. When they had severed ties with the navy program, they had been successful in demanding ownership of all their files. Some military scientists had mustered out of the service and gone immediately to work for Elizabeth, and the old admiral in charge of the program had since retired and was now dead.
The hardest blow that fate had helped them with was when the entire crew of research submersible Cetacean was lost in a collision with a Russian submarine under the polar icecap. Elizabeth formed AORI with Dr. Raggit and Dr. Lucca, and The Man from Atlantis no longer existed to the world. From the day of its completion, almost nineteen years ago, only a total of eleven people had ever passed through this gate and into Beachlab #1. Only those eleven, three of whom had since retired, had known Mark’s true identity and history. At least as much of his history as he knew. Of the three who retired, only Dr. Raggit was still alive. He finally moved into an old house he had lovingly restored on the lake at Arrowhead. Over the last four years, each time Mark and Elizabeth visited him, the rows of newly-painted canvasses expanded and the folders of poetry grew.
“Mark,” Dr. Raggit would say, wiping his hands with the turpentine soaked rag, “I have only two desires now. One is to create beauty.” And with a chuckle he’d continue, “Even though with over twenty-five open art shows, no one has yet bought my beauty. And, two, I want to live quietly and read other’s ideas of beauty.” And with that Mark and Elizabeth knew they were in for at least two hours of Thomas reading the latest poems that had moved his soul.
The good doctor would discover a piece and read it over and over until, he said, it became a part of him. Then he would write it out completely with his beautiful penmanship from memory and add it to the neat piles that grew in his study. He would always hold poems as his voice gave substance to the scripted lives, but his eyes never looked at the pages. Mark remembered Dr. Raggit’s response when Elizabeth had asked him why he wrote out the poems after he committed them to memory.
“It’s like a big circle, Elizabeth, my dear. I keep the poems that touch me,
but I don’t know why they do. After I have pounded them into my head and heart, I feel they are a part of my creative soul. But then, just like I can see a painting of mine in my head, I have to also put it on the canvass. Sort of like saying, yes, there it is! See I was right. It is beautiful! Then a part of the real me finds a voice it never had before.”
That was Mark’s introduction to poetry, and from the moment he heard the first lines he understood their attraction. These words could expand the definition of their creator.
“Elizabeth.” His voice had broken the silence they were both enjoying on the drive back to the coast after the first poetry session. “I would like to read more poetry.”
“Of course, Mark, we can get whatever you want.” She glanced briefly at him then continued to watch the road as she drove. “What would you like to find?”
“There are many parts of me that live in silence. I wish to find a way to give them a voice. A feeling kept silent can sadden the heart.”
His response almost caused her to drive off the road.
The engine noise was all the sound for miles.
“Sometimes,” she explained, “we want to have the world know our feelings but must make sure the knowledge of us will create good.”
He turned to her. “Would not the knowing be the good?”
“Sometimes the beauty of the poems we read is the only way the poet can express his heart without revealing the knowledge of who he really is. He can create the most value from the safety of his secrets. Often the heart should only reveal small hints as to what is there and let the one who reads the words define the writer.” She glanced at him quickly. “And sometimes we simply have to hope that people will know who and what we are without us telling them.”
The other two scientists who had worked at AORI and had left for the quieter life were now dead. Dr. Tony Lucca had been the first to replicate, although in a very minor way, Mark’s sonar-like silent communication. He dubbed it the nonaudible voice. The breakthrough came when he was able to dictate a constant frequency and a linear direction for sound waves in water. He had suffered a massive stroke only months after retiring and died, never having come out of his coma. Two years following that Mariyeh Sherwood, who had made incredible progress in accelerated cellular regeneration, was missing and presumed dead, having gotten lost in a snowstorm while on a skiing trip to Switzerland. Never heeding Elizabeth’s constant encouragement to document all her experiments, unfortunately, her discoveries disappeared with her. The institute was never able to carry forward with her work. Both of these losses saddened everyone at the institute and made their devotion to the happiness and wellbeing of Dr. Raggit all the stronger.
Man from Atlantis Page 2